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Tuesday, April 19, 2016

David Tovey is the Editor in Chief of the Cochrane Library, and has been working with the Cochrane Editorial Unit (CEU)
and the wider Cochrane collaboration in this role since 2009. In this
post, he discusses Cochrane's conflict of interest policy and recent
calls for re-assessment of its application in the conduct of Cochrane
Reviews.
I
didn’t know Bill Silverman, so I can’t judge whether he would be
“a-mouldering in his grave”. However, I recognise that James Coyne has set down a challenge to Cochrane
to explain its approach to commercial and academic conflicts of
interest and also to respond to criticisms made in relation to the
appraisal of the much debated PACE study.

Cochrane is still fairly unusual within the journal world in that it
specifies that in some cases declaration of interests is necessary but
insufficient, and that there are individuals or groups of researchers
who are not permitted to proceed with a given systematic review. This
has been true since 2004, when Cochrane’s Steering Group ratified a
commercial sponsorship policy that described circumstances where
authorship as proposed within a review could not go ahead. At the time,
Cochrane also introduced the post of Funding Arbiter, reporting directly
to its Steering Group, to ensure that the policy was followed, and to
rule on ambiguous or disputed cases. As Professor Lisa Bero says “The
Cochrane policy is strict because, first, there are no journals that
prohibit publication of systematic reviews funded by a company with a
financial interest in the outcome of the review. Second, to my
knowledge, there are no journals that require the majority of authors to
be without personal conflicts of interest, prohibit the first author
from having a conflict of interest, or prohibit company employees with a
conflict of interest from being an author. For example, the BMJ
conflict of interest policy states, ‘We are not aiming to eradicate such
interests; they are almost inevitable’ and authors with conflicts of
interest are not prohibited from being authors of BMJ original research,
systematic reviews or meta-analysis articles. The BMJ does prohibit
authors with COI from being authors of: Editorials and education
articles (clinical reviews, practice articles, state of the art reviews,
Minerva pictures, and Endgames), but these are different from
systematic reviews.”...